Hi Everyone!I'm crawling back from a major hard drive failure. I lost a ton of data.A couple of computer wiz friends could not recover the data. I think it will have to be attempted by hand. Does anyone know of a good recovery service. I'll pay up to $500.

Not a service, but supposingly data recovery softwares will swipe your drive cluster by cluster.

I did it once about 7 years ago (so the software used at that time would be irrelevant, something like magic backup or so)... I mounted my hard drive in an external casing and let it swipe all clusters. I thinkn it took about 90 hours non stop, and I receovered about 60% of my content. It was in a total mess, but I got the important ones back!

You should be able to find free recovery softwares out there, not sure if any recovery company can do more than that.

They recovered everything for him 100% of his 425GB of data. They advertize "if we cannot get the required data, no recovery fee will occur." They gave him an estimated cost of around $200 but when it was all done they only charged him $127.